Technical Field
This disclosure relates to distributor use of business policies with vendors in supporting distributor customers.
Description of Related Art
Customers demand cloud service distributors, providers, aggregators, and brokers to provide complete solutions instead of simply virtual machines and containers. It is difficult for a single vendor to deliver a complete suite of product and service offerings that are superior to all competitions or suitable to all business scenarios. A vendor may be strong at certain products and services, but otherwise not competitive on other areas of products and services. As used herein, the term “distributor(s)” is used to represent distributors, cloud service providers, aggregators, and brokers. Distributors build competitive solution bundles leveraging products and services from multiple vendors. Oftentimes, distributors wish to promote particular products or services from specific vendors due to business and/or technical reasons. Distributors therefore desire the flexibility to selectively enable and disable vendor product offerings. Distributors need the capability to “allow” only selected vendor products and services to appear on the market place.
One way to address the problem is to build a web front end at the distributors' market place for each of the vendors that suppresses undesirable vendor offerings. This approach is sometimes referred to as “distributor side filtering”. In distributor side filtering, the distributor's web front explicitly specifies what vendor products to offer and what vendor products to exclude. APS (Application Packaging Standard) applications that are hosted on ODIN operation and business automation platforms are examples of distributor side filtering. An APS application is developed and provided by a vendor and the application can be configured to show or hide vendor products. Customers can only see allowed vendor products appear on such vendor APS application. As a concrete example, SoftLayer APS implements an exclusion list so that distributors are able to configure which vendor devices and services are offered to customers of that distribution channel. A challenge with this approach is that the actual ordering of vendor devices and services occurs at the distributor portal, rather than at the vendor portal. An APS application running on the distributor portal is needed to implement provisioning functions in order for customers to order vendor devices and services. Consequently, development of such an APS application is a complex task. It is often very difficult to configure a correct ordering process that provides a robust environment for a vendor with a rich portfolio and intricate product dependency relationships. This complexity results in higher cost to develop and maintain APS applications, and further results in higher cost to host a market place by the distributor. In addition, this challenge is not specific to any particular market platform such as ODIN, but is instead a general problem when dealing with other market platforms as well, such as other business automation platforms.